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High resolution portable Audio is almost here...

Flint

Flint

Prodigal Son
Superstar
The PonoPlayer is going on Kickstarter on March 15th. This has been in the works for a very long time and Neil Young has been promoting it everywhere he goes.

Any takers?

http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/09/pono ... ampaign=sf

I am very tempted just to finally have something that sounds better than my beloved Zunes which are so old they could be using floppy disks.
 
It does not look at all comfortable to hold. First glance I thought it said "porno." It probably is a good player but I am ho-hum about Neil Young. I never gave a hoot about what he had to say.
 
Flint said:
The PonoPlayer is going on Kickstarter on March 15th. This has been in the works for a very long time and Neil Young has been promoting it everywhere he goes.

Any takers?

http://www.engadget.com/2014/03/09/pono ... ampaign=sf

I am very tempted just to finally have something that sounds better than my beloved Zunes which are so old they could be using floppy disks.
Click to expand...

If you love your Zunes so much, why not just use Windows Phone? The software is very similar and Nokia's hardware is fantastic. The build quality on my 920 and my wife's 1020 is superb and I definitely don't have any complaints with the audio quality (though I only have Westone UM-1 IEMs).

Here's my question: If we know that there is no audible improvement beyond 18 bit (and even that is pushing it) and we know that absolutely nobody (including studio engineers) can reliably detect the difference between a well-encoded 320k mp3 and a CD, why bother? Why deal with all the DRM nonsense to obtain an improvement that you probably can't hear well enough to pick out consistently in a double-blind test?
 
Good points. First off, I like the convenience of having music on my phone, but so far I haven't heard a phone which sounds good. I mean, they sound good when playing music, but there are often subtle pops and hisses when other sounds, like alerts, play, and sometimes between tracks when one track ends and another starts there is a just barely audible click. I also HATE the fact that every time I get a text, calendar alert, facebook alert, or other alert the phone will pause or mute the music to make the alert known. I realize I could turn off alerts, but when I am not listening to music I want to get the alerts, so I'd have to make a profile for listening to music and switch between profiles every time I start or stop listening to music.

I also want more capacity. I can get about 40GB to 60GB of music on one phone (32GB internal and 32GB external), and the new Samsung phones support 64GB uSD cards. I prefer to have 128GB or 256GB of storage.

Also, even the Nokia phones I've tested do not sound as good as my Zune players. I believe it has something to do with the fancy headset mic accessories, but it could just be saving a buck or reducing the size of the audio section. If I use a separate headphone amp, like the small Fios, they sound better. The Zune doesn't require any such add on amp.

So, there you go.

But, I am just thinking here. I probably won't get one.
 
Lone Stranger said:
It does not look at all comfortable to hold. First glance I thought it said "porno." It probably is a good player but I am ho-hum about Neil Young. I never gave a hoot about what he had to say.
Click to expand...

Yeah but how cool would it be to use Youngs player and Dre's headphones! :banana-dance:
 
The chicks might dig it.

Is that a Pono in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

My problem with mobile phone headphone ports are they are usually so cheap. If the prong moves a little bit you get the pops and scratches. Never had this problem with my cheap little sansa's.

Like all thing the Pono will probably downsize if it catches on. This is a big if. Im not sure your average teen gives a rats ass. They buy the cheapest earbuds and toss when they get dirty and or cord breaks. When working along highways I find these along shoulder all the time.
 
Srvy said:
Im not sure your average teen gives a rats ass.
Click to expand...


It's more than just teens that don't care, it's the vast majority of the market. People want content on a single device or at least from a single, always cnnected source. The market will not support another offline player, regardless of how high quality the audio is. The typical consumer has zero interest in owning, curating, importing/exporting their music collection. IMHO this device is destined to fail.
 
Towen7 said:
Srvy said:
Im not sure your average teen gives a rats ass.
Click to expand...


It's more than just teens that don't care, it's the vast majority of the market. People want content on a single device or at least from a single, always cnnected source. The market will not support another offline player, regardless of how high quality the audio is. The typical consumer has zero interest in owning, curating, importing/exporting their music collection. IMHO this device is destined to fail.
Click to expand...

Agreed, we see it more and more with other products as well. The soundbar and Bluetooth speakers have pretty much taken over where quality two channel and multi channel systems used to be.
 
walls said:
The soundbar and Bluetooth speakers have pretty much taken over where quality two channel and multi channel systems used to be.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I agree with that. I think the soundbar and Bluetooth speakers took over where people once used boom boxes and compact stereo systems and, let's face it, that was always the bigger market.
 
Towen7 said:
Srvy said:
Im not sure your average teen gives a rats ass.
Click to expand...


It's more than just teens that don't care, it's the vast majority of the market. People want content on a single device or at least from a single, always cnnected source. The market will not support another offline player, regardless of how high quality the audio is. The typical consumer has zero interest in owning, curating, importing/exporting their music collection. IMHO this device is destined to fail.
Click to expand...

I think a lot of the kids do care, but are largely ignorant. If they didn't care, they would not shell out for things like Beats. The problem is that they don't know what good sound sounds like.

My daughter grew up with decent sound all around her. Her bedroom system is my old 1987 vintage Integra integrated amp and a pair of Infinity bookshelf speakers from the late 1990s. She hates crappy earbuds. She doesn't like Beats. On the other hand, she is perfectly happy with the performance of the Bluetooth headphones I just got her running off her Android phone (even I think they sound pretty good). Can she tell that a full sized pair of studio grade headphones sounds better? Yes. Is she willing to sacrifice the portability, comfort and ease of use her current headphones provide to get that increment of improvement? No. That doesn't make her a Philistine. That makes her a solid customer of the kind of gear that makes our hobby possible: quality mid-fi home theater equipment.
 
Haywood said:
Towen7 said:
Srvy said:
Im not sure your average teen gives a rats ass.
Click to expand...


It's more than just teens that don't care, it's the vast majority of the market. People want content on a single device or at least from a single, always cnnected source. The market will not support another offline player, regardless of how high quality the audio is. The typical consumer has zero interest in owning, curating, importing/exporting their music collection. IMHO this device is destined to fail.
Click to expand...

I think a lot of the kids do care, but are largely ignorant. If they didn't care, they would not shell out for things like Beats. The problem is that they don't know what good sound sounds like.
Click to expand...

For every young consumer like your daughter there are hundreds that are the opposite. Of course the is and always will be a tiny little niche market for high quality audio. That doen't make this product viable. Most kids care about Beats headphones as more of a fashion accessory that happens to represent what they are told makes a good sounding headphone. The only comparison to this device is if by some miracle Neil Young becomes a pop/youth culture voice. Sorry. That aint happening. When this device started getting press a few years ago I asked my three teenaged kids and most of their and my friends about their impressions. They couldn't have cared less. The standard response was that they didn't want two devices when one will do. That was followed with even if it sounded like God was talking to them through the headphones, if they needed to plug it in to their computers or couldn't connect to cloud services on the go (mobile) that they were not even slightly interested.
 
I will share a story about the BEATS headphones...........................

We were in the Las Vegas Airport a couple of years back, just before Christmas. This was a business trip and our wives were with us.

My boss and his wife show up at the gate with a 2 pairs of BEAT Headphones, one for their son and one for their daughter. My boss tells me, "See Keith, things are changing, no more little ear buds, the kids are now into the big headphones like years ago". I just grinned and said "yup".

In this case it was just a simple example of status...... They were the hip thing at the moment, nothing to do with the sound, it was more about if you had them or not and what COLOR they were..........

:twocents-mytwocents:
 
I have been lusting after the Music Man media players for a long time, but there is no way I am spending that kind of money on something I could easily drop and break or likely have stolen.

I just want a >128GB media player which plays audio very well without any added noises or problems.
 
I do not want iTunes to ever touch my PC. I had to load it on my work PC for a project my agency was doing and my IT department declared it a hazardous malware because it insidiously inserts itself into every single application on your PC to make it impossible not to use all the time.
 
iTunes is an evil, insidious, registry fucking piece of malware designed to harass you into building your life around Apple's ecosystem and to make stepping outside of that grossly overpriced world as inconvenient as humanly possible. I hate it, but I'm stuck with it so long as there are iPads in my house.
 
I am most definitely interested in one of these. I first heard about Pono in 2012 when I read his autobiography "Waging Heavy Peace". In it he referenced the Pono player as well as his stab at an electric car in the Lincvolt. I would have loved a signature one with his signature or Tom Petty's but I see they are already sold out. So if I understand this correctly I go to Kickstarter and pledge, and that is essentially placing an order? I am not familiar with Kickstarter!!
Mike
 
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